MIT Terrascope and Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University

Pages

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Welcome to the blog for the Mission 2017 Terrascope trip to South Africa. This trip is the result of a relationship between the Terrascope program and the Earth Stewardship Science and AEON programs of Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU) in South Africa. Students and staff from MIT and NMMU will engage in discussion and debate that will hopefully lead to new ideas about how to deal with water issues in southern Africa and the world as well as a deeper appreciation of our different cultures and recent histories, especially the apartheid legacy of South Africa and the role of Nelson Mandela.

The blog will follow the experiences of MIT and NMMU students as they interact, educate one another, and delve into the issues of water issues in southern Africa and the world. MIT students will arrive in Port Elizabeth South Africa, Saturday evening, March 22 and a week of cultural exchange, development of new friendships, and intense learning experiences will begin. We hope you will enjoy following us as we deepen our understanding of issues related to access to water in the context of South Africa.

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Engaging with people from different parts of the world has always been a very enchanting experience for me. My time with the Terrascope team was all the more fascinating, as the focal point of our association would envisage poverty alleviation. The mechanism in which this collaboration took route was what resonated with me most. To illustrate...

Last Thursday night at 9 pm we were told that 6 MIT students would be competing against 6 NMMU students the following day in a debate about whether the Millenium Villages were helping Africa or if they were instead just a means to import/export American goods. The MITs mobilized into action. I observed a brilliant convergence of coordination and cooperation. It was the manifestation of Terrascope - it was beautiful.

I sat there in awe, trying to take in the experience, but also trying to participate and learn the content of the discussion. It was not easy. Hours passed of what felt like minutes. There was so much going on. Malte at the front on his super fast tablet connected to a projector capturing relevant arguments and drawing up the pros and cons. Francesca, the orchestrator, on her feet, democratically selecting the next hand to bring forth their point. And then the UTFs. Oh man these people gave their all to help facilitate their freshmen counterparts… and as we were there too.. so we benefited. They would fill our glasses with water, regulate the temperature of the room and making pretty ornaments keeping us creative and captivated. Everyone worked together in unison. Like a super brain with each student a super charged firing neuron.

This continued until 1 am. I hear these discussions would go on for much longer, but we were on “vacation”.

The following afternoon we had our debate. Which was more of a blur to me. But I remember it being exciting and realizing that we were designing a common path, one where we could together assist in building a desirable future for Africa.

The outcome of our debate, as I remembered it, was that the Millenium Villages were a failure. That we needed more cooperation between the aid givers (or investors) and the community receiving the aid, that is, as coordinators of such a project you would need to be open to the community and be vigorously adaptable. A local perspective was paramount. I think that was the take home message for me.

If we as NMMU students can take what we observed from Terrascope, we can make a difference. I look forward to designing our proposal for Missionvale together and hope that our collaboration continues to build as we go forward.

Thursday, March 27, 2014

But unlike most Mondays at MIT, my alarm rang not for a 9 a.m. class but an 8 a.m. briefing with NMMU faculty on their Missionvale campus, Development Studies students and Port Elizabeth community workers. We were preparing for a transect walk through several communities near Missionvale. The idea we were all operating on was that without understanding the social environment and historical context of the communities facing water crises on the ground, there was no way a sustainable solution could be implemented. Together with the community workers who had been through the area and the NMMU students, we began our walk through Soweto On Sea, the largest township in South Africa. We were told that whenever we wanted to approach someone we could ask them for help with translation, though most of the people there were comfortable with at least understanding English. We were also told that this was a relatively poor district and unemployment was extremely high, so though the people of the community were known for being extremely welcoming, we should still be careful of our material possessions.

As we walked through the community and asked various people if we could take pictures for our project, I was struck by their observations and their warmth, which often starkly contrasted with their destitute surroundings. Here are some of the Humans of Soweto On Sea, Brandon-Stanton-style:

***

The little girl had been standing by the door for quite some time with an ecstatic smile on her face, much like the one in this picture. When we approached, she ran off giggling to get her mother. Even as her mother told us about the traditional community gatherings, full of songs, dance, “plenty of meat, and African beer,” the little girl continued to smile, mesmerized by the microphone.

“I collect the plastic bottles thrown here and bring them to a woman. Sometimes she weighs them and tells me they are not enough, so she only gives me 20 Rand. Other days she may give me 30 Rand. I have to live that day with whatever she gives me.” [translated]

When we asked her for a picture, this woman ran into her house, and suddenly emerged with a broom to began to dance around the front of the house and mock-sweeping the ground.

“Hi, what’s your name?”

“My Xhosa name is ‘Noh-mah-soh-mee.’ But my English name is Princess.”

“Princess? That’s a pretty name.”

She laughs. “A pretty name? Well, thank you, my baby.”

“What are you here for? I want a new roof like that one! Please!” (jumping up and down)

“Do you see those horns on that stick? This is the traditional, sacred place in the house. If someone in the family is having problems, with their job, with their marriage, they will get up early and come and hope for a solution. When there’s a new baby, they might slaughter a goat, or for a big function they might slaughter a cow. I guess it’s pretty difficult to be vegetarian here.”

“Can I count for you?”

“You take picture of my car wash? Please? Come here, I show you. My car wash. You have to tell everyone about my car wash please! We get 45 Rand washing 2 cars per day for both of us. Please tell everyone about the car wash.”

***

These were a few of the many people who stopped to ask us what we were doing, who excitedly flocked to take pictures with us, or who were willing to tell us about their lives in Soweto On Sea. A couple of the community workers later told us that everyone wanted to know what we were going to help change. They called us a “beacon of hope.” It would have been really easy for them to face us with hostility for being “privileged,” for questioning what our presence there could do given that things hadn’t changed for years. But they didn’t. And they believed our presence could create that change.

The streets of Soweto.

MIT/NMMU students and community workers walking down a hill of trash into the Soweto community.

The group of us students from MIT and NMMU with community workers in Soweto Square, the site of many anti-apartheid protests and struggle.

The smiles in the picture above at the end of our transect walk through the Soweto On Sea community weren't all happiness. We were certainly humbled by the warm reception, incited by the desire to do something, but also disturbed by the mounds of trash, the broken abandoned houses where rapes and murders frequently occurred

The community's struggles reach back to times of apartheid in South Africa. Because Soweto On Sea had been a difficult area for the police to penetrate, the square we were standing in had been the center of the anti-apartheid movement, filled with activists who were hiding from the police, rallying the locals and planning their next moves. "Each week there would be a funeral for those who had died that week and a burial for those who had their funeral the previous week," he told us. "It became the basis of the political platform and language."

Deteriorating houses in Soweto.

The irony of it all, he told us, was that most of these people who fought were now the same ones who were unemployed in the township: "Victory has not served those who were on the frontlines." When asked why, he struggled a little to answer, ultimately settling on his belief that the current parliamentary was no longer connected to the township. "The people who fought at the time were not being educated," he pointed out. "They were busy planning attacks, sitting in prison, running from the police. They can't take part in the system now because they don't have the education to be on the same playing field. Now their only value to the parliamentarians is a voting majority, nothing else."

The man from the car wash came up to our group and emphatically pointed to the square behind him, "This place is the reason we have a black president now."

The point of the day suddenly became clear: all of the issues that South Africa faced, just like any other country, were the result of their history. As we returned to NMMU, the community workers and NMMU students filled in more of the gaps about this connection. Later that evening we even heard from two activists who were prominent during the anti-apartheid struggles, Bongani Gxilishe and Winky Mgqibisa, both of whom had been involved in the famous student uprising of 1976, in which black students protested against the requirement to be educated in the Afrikaans Bantu education system that had been enforced by the Afrikaaners.

"During apartheid, education was different for different people. It was meant to keep the blacks in different economic roles than the whites. That difference in quality has remained stagnant."

"My father was originally in the military before apartheid. Then he stole their money and left to the North to be trained so he could come back and fight. Come to think of it, I'm more fortunate now because my father's father was a doctor and my mother's father was a teacher. So when my parents were growing up in the struggle, my grandparents ensured they were getting their education first."

"I lost both of my parents when I was five. In the culture of black people, my child is your child and I was taken in by my neighbors. And it is because of them that I became what I am today, a firm believer in the Black Consciousness Movement. It's unfortunate that this history of the BC movement is now being distorted and students now don't care. Back then we were politicized at such a young age by what was happening around us. You know that building across the road? It is where most of the activists were tortured and killed."

The development crises that townships like Soweto On Sea faced today could then truly only be solved sustainably in the long run through education, a theme that came up again and again with many of the community workers and MIT students. We were shocked to find kids in uniform walking around the neighborhood, not in school. The community workers told stories of schools with 42 children in a ten-square-meter area, with the teacher not even being paid for the first five years of teaching. "My child goes to this school," she said. "How is a teacher supposed to teach if she is hungry and frustrated without electricity?" Another student stood up and cried, "Is there no over-sight to who is teaching in our schools? People who are educated just leave the township and there is no inspiration for children who are hungry to go to school because they see no value. There is not a culture of learning here. You know this whole host of problems? Everyone talks about them and how we need solutions. But no one ever really works out those solutions."

Indignation started to fill the room, and continued to follow us as we loaded onto the bus. MIT and NMMU students were talking together, expressing their frustration by the problem, without a viable solution. So when we arrived at Charles Duna Primary School, the atmosphere of desperation was looking for some answer, for a glimmer of hope. And Nombulelo Sume, the principal of the school, gave us just that. She told us the story of how she fought to balance the school's lack of access to water with her fervent belief in placing the education of the children, "the poorest of the poor" first above all else.

You could hear a quiet awe and empowerment that everyone felt as she told us of the challenges she faced and her ability to rally the community behind her. Most of us could not imagine parents volunteering their time to carry buckets of water and manually flush the toilets in the school, just to ensure that their child could have an education after the government could not support that change. Having just seen communities where education was completely disregarded, it was refreshing, inspiring to see how the indifference toward education could be overcome. Because of Ms. Sume's persistence, a representative from Coca-Cola's rainwater harvesting program heard about the school. Despite the fact that they had already filled their quota of 100 schools, the representative pushed ahead and listed Charles Duna Primary School as the 101st school. As of July of last year, thanks to the program, the school finally had water flowing from their taps.

And her efforts didn't stop there. "One of our other community projects is a vegetable garden," she said. "When I started this school, I was burying a child each year. When I asked their parents what they would eat, it was full of carbohydrates. No fruits, no vegetables. So we are using the school as a center of progress for the community. We haven't had a single HIV-related death now in 8 years." Nombulelo also talked about giving everything else she could to make the students competitive, like arts, drama, and sports programs ("We have a student who is now playing on the national soccer team!").

Nombulele showed us that it is possible to make progress despite the overwhelming sense of complexity in the status quo: "I ask for the richer schools' old, used uniforms. I find scraps of boxes and metal for the kids' projects. I am trying to build a library. You know, you have to dispel the myth of 'poor me, I can't do anything because I don't have anything.'"

Nombulele Sumo, the principal of Charles Duna Primary School, led the school through the lack of water and other resources while reshaping the community as a whole.

When we passed by a room under reconstruction, she said, "It's going to be my future science lab. You have to dream, right?"

Wednesday's drive west on the Garden Route across the bottom of South Africa took our travelling caravan past many beautiful views. The Indian Ocean crashed or lapped onto sandy beaches. Ancient rocks, stromatolites, angular unconformities, all these and more geological features abounded. We drove along the Cape Fold Belt and saw very steep canyons sliced into the terrain. I heard the words written above as we pulled across from an area of rusty red conglomerates. Yes, we were stopping to see more rocks, and each time we did, more of this country's landforms became clear and cameras clicked.

Tomorrow we will again take to the rocks, this time to caves at a place called Pinnacle Point. Somehow the week has flown by and the sense of time is strange. We have taken only six days to explore things that happened thousands or millions of years ago. As we explore this site tomoroow, what evidence of HomoSapiens might we find there with us?

Vicki McKenna took some photographs on our tour of the forest preserve and farm on the George campus of Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University.

Learning about the forest of the Southern Cape.

A Terrascope Radio student recording our guide.

Bastien looking at the recently planted test plot.

Professor Raymond Auerbach showing us the plan for the test plot.

Professor Auerbach talks about the permaculture structure. This features a partial roof feeds a large rain barrel. The rain barrel supplies water to the irrigation system, which is powered by solar power (with a solar panel on the roof). Solar power also powers the electric fence, which keeps out baboons.

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

MIT and NMMU students are working on flooding and other water issues in informal settlements around the Missionvale campus of NMMU. Yesterday morning, before the debate, students from both schools worked on the projects together. Vicki McKenna tooks some pictures of the students working together.

About Terrascope

Terrascope is a learning program for MIT freshmen that begins each year with a class (12.000 or Mission 20XX) devoted to understanding and proposing solutions to a complex problem related to Earth’s environment and sustainability. This year in Mission 2017 freshmen were challenged to develop a plan to ensure that all nations have access to clean fresh water. Students researched the problem in the fall semester and developed a series of possible solutions. Their ideas were presented in a public forum, and critiqued by a panel of experts. They also produced a website with comprehensive information on the plan. The field visit to South Africa enables students to extend their learning in Mission by gaining first hand experience with many of the issues they identified during the semester as critical to equitable access to sources of clean water. The boots on the ground view of the problem will be quite different from that in Cambridge, MA.